You and Me, Baby, Ain't Nothing But Mammals

Blessings Darlings!

In a conversation with the Chubby Hubby, I was again decrying folks looking to 'consume' spirituality - buying lots of items, saving lots of shared 'information' on someone's ideas of what each days correspondences are, short meanings of symbols, short info on herbs, memes, etc. The CH, being wonderful and brilliant (why else would I marry and have children with him?) pointed out that 'consumption' is a very basic animal survival skill.  He pointed to the cattle in the fields around the house - and that they spend darn near the entire day eating/chewing their cuds.  They, literally consume ALL DAY LONG.  He's certainly right about that!

OTOH - they eat grass.  Grass is very low in nutritional value.  They have to consume all day to get what they need, BECAUSE WHAT THEY EAT IS OF LOW VALUE.

We're mammals, yes - but we aren't cattle or sheep, right?

We humans are omnivores.  Our systems are able to handle food with higher nutritional (and caloric) density.  Eating a pound of meat will give us way more calories (the macroelement that powers our larger brains!) and still leave us more leisure time to focus on other things than eating enough raw spinach to provide us with the same amount of calories.  Even cooking the spinach - putting some effort in early on - provides us with the vitamins and minerals that are more abundant in spinach, and makes it faster to eat it.

Now, apply that knowledge to our minds.  You can try to fill up your mind using ... generic stuff shared on Facebook, from unknown and unvetted sources (even if you know the person sharing the printable cliff notes on herbs or crystals or whatever).  Feeding your mind well on that stuff is going to take ingesting that all day every day.  And not leave you time to do other things, whether than be your family, your job, cleaning house, overthrowing patriarchy - whatever.

Now, apply that knowledge to our spirits. Action (like at least cooking the spinach) helps you feed yourself better.  There is a difference in the 'nutritional density' between active an passive spirituality.  Passive spirituality would be things like consuming a public ritual done by others, where you are rather like an audience member at a performance, passively letting the actors move you 'between the worlds' and them doing all the work vs you being there and actively sending energy to everything from the casting of sacred space to the magical working (you've now cooked the spinach!) and doing ritual/magic yourself.  There is a difference between lying out in the grass 'open for the Divine to fill you' vs making offerings to a specific God or Goddess, or writing poetry for/about that Divinity.  There is a difference between gathering what you find from whatever unvetted source online and saving it on your hard drive vs getting stuff from vetted sources online vs taking classes from vetted sources vs putting what you learn into action.

You might just want to actively think about this.

Frondly, Fern